dead login sessions

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sirs,

Sometime after loging out from the servers the session remains active.

After few days we notice there are lots of sessions.

I am aware of that if we are not coming out by typing "exit" command then session may remain active.

Can anyone suggest what are the other reasons of remaining these login sessions active ? How to fix this ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Joseph Loo]

hi,

if u mean idle sessions, u may like to enforce a timeout in either individual or all accounts.

if u mean hanged/defunct/zombie sessions, these r sessions which may die eventually. however, if u r very sure that the session may be "killed", go ahead and "kill".


regards.

[Arunvijai_4]

Shiv, you can set timeout variable in .profile for users. Other reasons are, particular process started by users, remain active and waiting for some I/O. (This is because of bad programming practices)

-Arun

[Muthukumar_5 · Accepted solution]

It is because of improper logout and session hanging etc. To cotrol this, you can set TMOUT Variable in /etc/profile.

TMOUT If set to a value greater than zero, the shell
terminates if a command is not entered within the
prescribed number of seconds after issuing the PS1
prompt.

Another way is to calculate IDLE time with w command execution. Make a script and execute it with cron to check unused sessions.

-Muthu

[Indira Aramandla]

Hi Shivkumar,

If the session are not exited properly, then they may be left has hanging sessions.

You can force a terminal to log out after a period of inactivity by setting the TMOUT and TIMEOUT parameters in the /etc/profile file or the userâ s profile in their home directory.

The TMOUT parameter works in the ksh (Korn) shell, and the TIMEOUT parameter works in the bsh (Bourne) shell.

To drop idle sessioon try using the shell variables such a TMOUT. The idle telnet session can be automatically cleared by setting the timeout value. A non-zero value specifies the number of minutes to wait before an idle telnet session is timed out. The minimum value is 1 minute, the maximum is 512640 minutes (1 year).

For Example the following entries, in the .profile file, forces the terminal to log out after an hour of inactivity:

TO=3600
echo "Setting Autologout to $TO"
TIMEOUT=$TO
TMOUT=$TO
export TIMEOUT TMOUT


Indira A

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi shiv,

please follow the guidelines by IA above.

in the meanwhile, you can kill the old sessions by doing:
1. who -u|grep old
2. kill -9

good luck!
yogeeraj

[Muthukumar_5]

old is made with who -u on sessions details If more than twenty-four hours have elapsed or the line has not been used since boot time, the entry is marked old.

It will be good when you want to kill sessions more than 24 hours. To control based on time then TMOUT / who -u's month and date details.

~regards

[Kent Ostby]

If you're intent is mostly to get rid of dead sessions, I would suggest a fairly high TMOUT value.

As someone who likes to have multiple sessions open on a server, it gets irritating when I come back the next morning and all of my sessions have timed out.

I probably would set your timeout to something large enough to span a couple of days, but that may not work for your environment.

[Bill Hassell]

Are these simple telnet sessions initiated from PCs? If so, the standard /etc/profile has two trap statements that must be preserved. The first disables interrupts from CTRL-C and other kill signals such as hang-up. The second trap statement reenables normal trap behavior. Some sysadmins think this is a typo error and remove the last trap in /etc/profile. What this does is to disable the kernel's ability to terminate sessions which have become disconnected (known as a hang-up). Make sure that traps are enabled for these users. The command trap with no options will repoert on special handling.

[Raj D.]

Hi Shiv ,

Before the process goes zombie and terminates abnormally , set TMOUT variable in /etc/profile that will close the session properly.

TMOUT=value ; export TMOUT

value is a numeric value in sec for timeouttime .

Hope this will help.

Cheers,
Raj.

[Shivkumar]

Bill, Yes. You are right. These connections are the telnet sessions initiated from the PCs using Reflection-X remote connection software tool. Please let me know exact command syntax to enter in the /etc/profile file.

best regards,
Shiv

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi shiv,

at the start of your /etc/profile, you should have the following lines:

# Ignore HUP, INT, QUIT now.
trap "" 1 2 3

then at the end:
# Leave defaults in user environment.
trap 1 2 3

hope this helps too!

kind regards
yogeeraj